


feels like we only go backwards

by Sybill



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Fridge Horror, Horror, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 09:50:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2503493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sybill/pseuds/Sybill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>McCoy fights to save the crew of the Enterprise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	feels like we only go backwards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allekha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/gifts).



McCoy was used to things from space attacking his crew. Space beings, space parasites, space diseases, space dogs, space rocks – you name it, it had interfered with the Enterprise. Often it had bitten a certain reckless Captain in the metaphorical nuts (sometimes not even metaphorical).

When people started de-aging after a trip to Sigma Tisin, he brought out his tricorder and started cracking. It seemed like every week there was something new. A reaction to the local fauna, maybe, or perhaps a secretive society down there that had somehow eluded their readings. It wouldn’t have been hard to elude them, since the reason they were down there in the first place was because the ship’s readings had been blocked by atmospheric disturbance, and then two of the away team had begun aging backwards while on the surface. People were bound to be a little distracted.

He fought the thing – whatever it was – for two days. He ruled out some things, couldn’t rule out others. He took samples, he put the affected crewmembers under 24-hour supervision. The attempt at a quarantine quickly became an actual quarantine, when crewmembers who hadn’t been down on Sigma Tisin began to suffer effects. Space things that could spread were not good news.

Spock was a gawky teenager, all ears. He tracked his symptoms for McCoy logically and faithfully, and McCoy pretended not to notice that there were suspicious gaps occasionally. With medbay full, they’d been confining people to quarters, and Spock and Kirk’s quarters adjoined; two men in a relationship who suddenly found themselves with the teenage stamina to match their adult experience were going to need a stress reliever. He was just glad Spock didn’t feel the need to document _those_ changes.

Those were some of the few moments of levity McCoy had during those two days. Being chief medical officer on the Enterprise was a feast-or-famine job; some weeks, he had nothing to do but run routine physicals and STD tests, and others, he was fighting for the life of his crew. This week wasn’t a good one, but he’d come through weeks like this before. He was a good doctor, goddammit, and he’d be damned if he was going to be CMO to a ship full of five-year-olds.

It hadn’t touched him, yet. He didn’t know why. There were a few of them it hadn’t touched. By now, they were pretty sure it wouldn’t get them; walking the empty corridors of the ship, with the de-aging crewmembers locked in their quarters, was like walking through a ghost town. Uhura was the only other senior crew member left. 

“How are you, Acting Captain?” he asked her, trying to make her smile.

Even without a bridge crew – they’d stayed in orbit around Sigma Tisin, in case a return trip was needed (though McCoy wasn’t going anywhere near that planet), and while in orbit most of the unaffected crewmembers were needed in engineering – Uhura had dressed in full uniform. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d stayed at her communications post, holding to the familiar, but she sat firm and sure in the captain’s chair, watching over the ghost bridge.

“Nothing to report,” she said. Her fingers were tight on the arms of the chair. “You?”

“The youngest have just regressed past puberty,” McCoy said, not sugarcoating it. “I think I’m slowing it down, though. I’m trying.”

“Get them back,” she said, the intensity in her voice louder than shouting would have been.

“Aye aye, Captain,” he said, saluting, and went back to sickbay.

On the third day, it changed.

Ensign Posey was the youngest, a cherub-faced girl of about five. She hadn’t been on the away mission, but as one of the youngest crew-members on board, it’d had a shorter way to go. Chekhov wasn’t much older, his curls as tousled as ever. Kirk and Spock – damn their regulation-breaking propensity for going on away missions together – were about eight years old, and McCoy didn’t know which was bigger, Kirk’s eyes or Spock’s ears.

Posey was first. The de-aging stopped; her body became stable. She was a five-year-old who could do particle physics, but she was alive. McCoy didn’t even know where to begin with the re-aging process, but that could wait – the important thing was figuring out which of the treatments he’d tried had worked on her, and repeating it with the others before they aged down into diapers. He was a doctor, not a nursemaid.

At first he wasn’t sure if he’d be in time. Perhaps Posey would be the only survivor – perhaps it would affect some people differently than others. So far all of those affected had kept their minds, even as they de-aged – how horrible would it be to be a squalling infant, and know how to fix a starship’s engines? 

Chekhov stopped. And then Chapel. And then everyone started stopping, including – though he’d never admit the full extent of his relief to that green-blooded hobgoblin – Spock and Kirk.

“Report: we have acquired a ship full of five-year-olds, Captain,” he told Uhura. 

She smiled. “Hopefully nobody throws any temper tantrums while you investigate how to re-age them.”

“Scotty already kicked a hole in my sickbay door when I told him I had no idea how long it would take,” McCoy agreed, gloomily. “No idea how a five-year-old has that strong a kick. I’m working as fast as I can, but I have to sleep sometimes. I’m just happy they’re still all toilet-trained.”

When he woke up the next morning, the ship was eerily quiet.

 _Perhaps they’re all sleeping_ , he thought, uneasily, as he walked quickly toward sickbay. On a whim, he stopped at Spock and Kirk’s quarters first. Spock hadn’t sent in his log from yesterday yet, and McCoy was in the mood to see a living person right now, even if only through a viewscreen. You started seeing echoes on a ship this deserted.

There was no answer at the door.

McCoy tried the intercom three times, but got only static. He buzzed the bridge. “Uhura, I can’t raise Spock and Kirk.”

He could hear the strain in her voice when she answered. “I thought you said it had stopped.”

“The aging did stop, it stopped for nearly a full day. Pull their quarters up on camera.”

He listened to Uhura’s breathing. Then, “Leonard, the cameras have been destroyed from the inside.”

If McCoy had been wearing a heart-rate monitor, he knew it would’ve shrieked in alarm. He forced himself to stay calm. “Well, maybe one of them didn’t want us looking in on them earlier. When they were teenagers, you know.” Actually, come to think of it, he didn’t know how many people _did_ know that those two were together. He only knew because he’d had to give Spock the extra-exhaustive STD test, including all the STDs that didn’t have harmful effects for _normal_ people, because James T. Kirk’s immune system didn’t play nicely with others.

“Just a second,” she said, and he could hear her get up, the sound of her shoes loud on the quiet bridge. Then she was back. “Leonard,” she said, and the strain in her voice was fear now, “There aren’t any life signs.”

“Maybe they broke quarantine,” McCoy said, although his stomach had dropped to the floor, because Spock never would, not even as a five-year-old, not even with Kirk begging full force. 

“There aren’t any life signs on the whole ship,” she said, “except the ten of us who weren’t infected.”

He broke the door down, metaphorically, giving the string of access codes he needed to unseal the quarantine faster than he would have believed possible. Perhaps the ship’s sensors were malfunctioning. They hadn’t been able to analyze Sigma Tisin, after all. Spock and Kirk would be curled up like a pair of puppies, and Spock would berate him for fifteen minutes in his child-Vulcan voice for breaking quarantine.

He saw them by the windows.

For a moment, his heart soared. “They’re here, Uhura, they’re here!” he shouted over his shoulder, trusting the access panel to pick it up.

And then Spock and Kirk turned, their eyes full black, as black as space, and McCoy realized for the first time that the de-aging hadn’t been the disease.

It had been the portal.


End file.
